The pandemic is all but over, and mask and vaccine mandates are being lifted all around us. After two years of the pandemic upending life as we know it, normalcy is coming back.
Yet, for some reason, the push to unnecessarily vaccine young children continues.
On Wednesday, a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee voted unanimously to recommend Pfizer’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines for children under six years old — which likely means that FDA approval is inevitable, as the FDA typically follows the recommendations of the panel.
The committee claims they found that the vaccines provided safe and effective protection against COVID for kids, even though fully vaccinated and boosted adults have still caught COVID.
But what’s the point?
CDC data shows that school-age children have a COVID recovery rate of 99.997% — better than their mortality risk from the seasonal flu. Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that various studies have all shown that children are at an “extremely slim risk from dying from COVID-19.”
That hasn’t stopped the media from trying to scare parents into getting their kids vaccinated. In December, the media claimed there was a surge in child COVID hospitalizations. It was completely false, but the media still pushes that lie, scaring parents into thinking that kids are better off if they’re vaccinated. However, earlier this year, health officials in Sweden decided against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-12, arguing that the benefits don’t outweigh the risks.
So why are we even talking about vaccinating kids against COVID in the United States? It’s not for safety reasons. That much is clear.
Related: ‘Natural Immunity Wins Again’
Last year, a UK-based study found that unvaccinated children are safer from COVID than even vaccinated adults of any age. “According to that data, an unvaccinated 10-year-old, who may look like the very picture of COVID vulnerability heading into the school year, faces a lower mortality risk than a vaccinated 25-year-old, whom we might today regard as close to safe as can be,” David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine wrote. “In England, the incidence of hospitalization among unvaccinated kids was lower than that of those vaccinated aged 18-29, and in recent weeks, the hospitalization rate among kids ages 5 to 14 has been only about one per 100,000.”
So what’s the point? We know that kids are overwhelmingly safe from COVID. Most likely, if your kids ever had it, they experienced mild symptoms or were asymptomatic. As such, it is far better for them in the long term to acquire natural immunity than to take a vaccine that is so new without long-term data.
A recent study from Emory University found that patients who have recovered from COVID “retain broad and effective longer-term immunity to the disease.” A study from the Cleveland Clinic similarly found that natural immunity was far superior to vaccination. If your kid isn’t in a high-risk group, there’s only one reason to get them vaccinated, and that’s because Big Pharma wants to make money.
Studies have shown that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are more likely to cause myocarditis in young men than natural infection from COVID. Studies suggest that there’s anywhere from a 1-in-5,000 to a 1-in-6,000 chance of myocarditis in young men who receive a second dose of an mRNA vaccine. According to Doran Fink, M.D., deputy director of the clinical side of the FDA’s Division of Vaccines and Related Products Applications, “when you look at the balances of risk versus benefit, what we really start to see is risk of myocarditis being higher [than risk from COVID-19] in males under age 40.”
If your child is in a high-risk group and you feel there’s a benefit to getting them vaccinated, discuss it with your doctor, but most kids don’t need to be vaxxed, and you shouldn’t feel pressured or bullied into doing so. Make the right choices for you and your family, not Big Pharma.
